Organizers and co-sponsors
Chicago-Kent College of Law at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Pristina Law Faculty, the McCormick-Tribune Foundation, Northwestern University’s Center for International and Comparative Studies & Consortium for Central and Southeast European Studies and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations are institutional co-sponsors. Additional co-sponsors are being sought.

Henry H. Perritt, Jr. is a Professor of Law and former Dean of the Chicago-Kent College of Law, the law school of Illinois Institute of Technology. He has been active in the Balkans since 1996, organizing student groups to deploy Internet-based technology to support legal institutions in Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo, and Macedonia, to improve the functioning of governmental ministries in those four countries, also facilitating access by members of the free press to each other and to the outside world. Mr. Perritt also has advised ministers of interim and provisional government institutions in Kosovo on programs of economic development, and worked with internationals in the Kosovo Department of Trade and Industry to develop structures for privatization. He and his students sponsored by ABA/CEELI’s Balkan Law School Initiative, developed and implemented an externship program at the University of Prishtina Law Faculty, which allows Kosovar law students to gain practical experience before they complete their academic studies in law. Mr. Perritt has written and lectured extensively on legal and policy issues in the Balkans and other nationbuilding contexts. He understands politics and public administration at the practical level, having served on the White House staff and as Deputy Undersecretary of labor in the Ford Administration, having served on President Clinton’s Transition Team, and having been the Democratic nominee for the U.S. House of Representatives in the 10th District of Illinois in 2002. He is a member of the bar of Virginia, Pennsylvania, District of Columbia, Maryland, Illinois, and the United States Supreme Court. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the Board of Directors of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations.

Andrew Baruch Wachtel is Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor, Chair, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, and Director of the Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University. He organized the Consortium for Central and Southeast European Studies at Northwestern. He is the author of Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia. StanfordUniversity Press, 1998; "Translation, Imperialism and National Self-Definition in Russia " Public Culture 11 (1), 1999, pp. 49-73; "The South Slavic Lands During World War I: Culture and Nationalism," European Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914-1918. . Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 193-214; and is working on a History of the Balkans, commissioned by Oxford University Press. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.